2011 US & World Champions Flow into Germany

This is a re-post. Original article published 2/18/12.

2011 US Champion NORDIC THUNDER (Justin Howard) has been asked to accompany 2010 World Champion DEVIL’S NIECE to take part in the 2011 Flow Aus Spielen convention in Wolfsburg March 8-11.

For those unfamiliar with the psychological concept of flow, here’s the wiki. For those of you unfamiliar with the correlations between Flow and Air Guitar, I have pasted the first two paragraphs of the wiki below, with a blanket Mad Lib replacement of “flow” with “Air Guitar.” At their very core, the two concepts are clearly interchangeable. Of course, “masturbation” fits in pretty damn well, too.

Air Guitar is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the positive psychology concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

According to Csíkszentmihályi, Air Guitar is completely focused motivation. It is a single-minded immersion and represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performing and learning. In Air Guitar, the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand. To be caught in the ennui of depression or the agitation of anxiety is to be barred from Air Guitar. The hallmark of Air Guitar is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task although Air Guitar is also described as a deep focus on nothing but the activity – not even oneself or one’s emotions.